‘Day by day the harrowing stories increase.’
Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

While sitting in an Alabama jail, Martin Luther King Jr began writing a letter about the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. He invoked the legal maxim originating with St Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all. This week, attorney general Jeff Sessions quoted the bible to justify a cruel policy that is, in fact, not a required law: the forced separation of immigrant families at the border.

Sessions cracked a smile when he said, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” The former Alabama senator knows what he’s doing. Surely, he’s familiar with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In contempt for a rich tradition of Christian resistance to injustice, he is cherry-picking the bible to serve a despotic white nationalist agenda. Racism under the guise of “law and order” redux.

Day by day the harrowing stories increase, from infants being snatched from their nursing mothers to the construction of prison camps for children. As others have pointed out, the zero-tolerance policy plays into a longer American history of Native American and African American children being ripped from their parents.

Just one day before Sessions’ public statement, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement condemning the administration for separating young immigrant children from parents and creating new asylum limits for those fearing domestic violence. Even the Southern Baptist Convention and Reverend Franklin Graham have criticized the administration’s actions. Yet, Sessions, in his statement, explicitly dismissed the concerns of those he called “our church friends.”

Responding to a question about Sessions’ bible comment, press secretary Sarah Sanders claimed “it is very biblical to enforce the law.” But this reflects a selective reading of scripture with its own troubling past. Moreover, it erases the sacredness of resisting oppression.

As writer Rachel Held Evans points out in her new book about the bible, Inspired, nearly half of all defenses of slavery in the buildup to the American Civil War were written by Christian ministers citing scripture. Later, many white Christians anchored their objections to the Civil Rights movement in Romans 13 and a decontextualized reading of the apostle Paul.

For every passage in the bible about submitting to authority, there’s another passage about a prophet calling out the authorities. Jesus Christ, himself, was crucified for subverting religious and political authorities. At the very beginning of the Exodus story, a group of midwives disobey a king’s cruel policy targeting children.

These are the kinds of biblical stories that informed Angelina Grimké when she became one of the very few white southern women to openly support the cause of abolition. In her “Appeal to Christian Women of the South” written in 1836, she states: “If a law commands me to sin I will break it ...The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.”

There is no divine mandate requiring us to accept an unjust policy or law. But, some might ask, how do we differentiate a just law from an unjust law? Who decides? That was a question King addressed with the following principle, “a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself.” It’s the golden rule writ large.

This is what was at stake when a reporter passionately asked Sarah Sanders if she has any empathy for separated immigrant families given the fact that she’s a parent of young children.